It’s really not a question of whether the building was worthy of designation,” then-alderman Edwin P. Fifielski said of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building in 1971, months before it was demolished for a modern office building, 30 N. LaSalle. “It was a matter of weighing the aesthetic value of the building with the money involved to buy and maintain it. It would be true of any landmark in the city.”
The impact of all this rippled far beyond Chicago. In the 1920s the National Organization of Building Owners and Managers reached out to newspapers, bankers, and public officials across America in order to spread the notion of building obsolescence. During this time, Detroit wrecked a 15-year-old downtown hotel using obsolescence calculations perfected in Chicago. Federal tax laws were changed to take building depreciation into account. Nationally, real estate leaders in the 20s openly claimed new homes had only 50-year life spans. Notions of building obsolescence expanded after World War II, with the methodology tricked out a bit to show how entire neighborhoods could be deemed outmoded and thereafter demolished.
By Daniel M. Abramson (University of Chicago Press)
